Eminent Chancellor, I present to you a creative leader of international repute in the health world. Fred Mott is a medical citizen in both Canada and the United States, since reared in New Jersey he spent his summers in our Laurentian Hills; after an honors degree in history at Princeton, he took medicine at McGill, and lengthy service in federal departments in Washington preceded government posts in Saskatchewan.
Special events shaped the early life of this son of a family dedicated to human welfare. In his teens, he spent many months in Europe and the Far East as secretary to his late father, John R. Mott, pioneer YMCA and missionary leader and present Nobel prize winner for contributions to world peace. His flare for internationalism also touched his marriage to Marjorie Heeney of Winnipeg. When illness forced him to forego his clinical ambition to be a family doctor his idealism took him to the wider field of rural health and medical care which had gained great significance in the depression. Through twenty years he has devoted himself largely to problems in this field. His book on rural health and medical care written with Milton Roemer in 1948 is a definitive treatise. Under federal authorities he conducted medical care and public health activities among low-income farmers and migratory workers throughout United States.
In Saskatchewan Dr. Mott served as chairman of the Health Services Planning Commission from 1946 through 1951. During the latter half of this period he acted also as Deputy Minister of Public Health. To him we owe much of the unique accomplishment in public health and medical care planning for which this province has some renown. Now, again, he is pioneering on behalf of better health services for people who need them. For the United Mine Workers of America he is setting up a network of ten regional hospitals in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia to serve communities of nearly half a million people. In all these projects he has displayed lofty ideals, clarity of vision, prodigious capacity for work and genius for enlisting men of talent and enthusiasm.
Eminent chancellor, I ask that you confer on Frederick Dodge Mott the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.